Judge: Telecoms never challenged surveillance

9/17/13 9:00 PM EDT

The country’s top telecom providers have never challenged in court the government’s requests for bulk access to phone call logs, according to documents newly declassified Tuesday.

Under the Patriot Act, the U.S. government can mandate companies like Verizon and AT&T to turn over batches of so-called metadata that show calls made and received — but “no holder of records” has mounted a legal fight against the request, according to a judge for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

“Indeed, no recipient of any Section 215 order has challenged the legality of such an order, despite the explicit statutory mechanism for doing so,” continued Judge Claire V. Eagan in her Aug. 29 opinion, referring to a portion of the Patriot Act. (Her opinion is posted here.)

A spokesman for Verizon declined to comment for this story; spokespeople for AT&T and Sprint were not immediately available to comment.

The documents declassified Tuesday are significant because any challenge to the government’s authority under the Patriot Act — if there even had been one — would have happened in a classified setting. The programs and the government’s legal tactics themselves had been secret, until Edward Snowden this summer began leaking details about bulk telephone data collection to The Guardian.

Even so, any telecom company that tried to fight the feds would have faced daunting odds, partly because the law itself is broad.

The release of new FISA Court documents also comes as the White House remains on the defensive about its surveillance practices while congressional calls for reform intensify.

The Obama administration has released new details about the data it collects and its legal justifications — though some remain critical of the disclosures as they seek more. For now, the country’s top intelligence official pointed to the court’s once-secret Aug. 29 order as evidence its conduct is lawful.

“Today the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court released a previously classified opinion reauthorizing the collection of bulk telephony metadata under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act,” said James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence. “The opinion affirms that the bulk telephony metadata collection is both lawful and constitutional. The release of this opinion is consistent with the President’s call for more transparency on these valuable intelligence programs.”